Thoughts

Forest Bathing

tree

A friend posted recently to Facebook, thanking a 300+ year old tree in Philadelphia for lending her some of its energy in a difficult time. It’s a tree with many stories tied to it.

I know that feeling well, at least the part about the tree. There’s a tree at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens that I have regularly visited over my years in Brooklyn — a giant London Planetree that is likely not nearly as old as that oak, but still throbs with its own stories and energy. Whenever I show it to someone new and wrap my arms around it, they never fail to mimic me, resting their cheeks on its surface, listening and holding with their whole bodies.

That tree forms the apse of a large chapel created by a small but towering grove of Planetrees that perfectly demonstrate just what it was that all those early architects were aiming for with their cathedrals, lifting impossibly into the sky, arcs of light cutting through the buttresses and archways, humble humans gathered below in awe. I have sat and lain on the benches beneath that grove many times, in wonder and repose.

How can you not love a tree? All the life it carries, the impossibility of its always-reaching form, everything that it has to offer.

By Alexis

Alexis Clements is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her creative work has been published, produced, and screened in venues across the US, Europe, and South America. Her feature-length documentary film, All We’ve Got, premiered in the fall of 2019 in New York City and has since screened around the US and internationally. Her play Unknown also premiered in October 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Other plays of hers have been produced, published, and anthologized across the US and the UK over the past two decades. Her prose writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Nature, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. In addition to her writing and filmmaking, she is currently serving on the Executive Board of CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), as a Coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and a co-founder of Little Rainbows, a queer story time for children and their caretakers.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *